Our Capabilities

We utilised the following ethos as we built our technical capabilities (Figure 2):

• Chemistry: Advance from 2-D to 3-D chemical assessment incorporating the latest techniques that would enable characterisation of both whole aerosols in addition to the quantification of single molecules more accurately.
• Toxicology: Adoption of state-of-the-art Toxicological methods, building on expertise in classical toxicology, to enable more disease relevant assessment with a focus on reducing animal testing to a minimum via 21st Century Toxicology and novel Organ on a Chip methodologies.
• Consumer Use Behaviour: While smoker use behaviour has been measured for decades, augment techniques to enable measurement of Smokeless Products and how they impact adult consumers' lives.
• Consumer Assessment: As we continue to encourage adult smokers who would otherwise continue to smoke to switch to Smokeless Products, we are developing a range of techniques that enable better assessment of products that meet consumer preferences.
• Consumer Impact Science: Learn from other industries to develop novel scientific assessment methods that would measure the impact of    Smokeless Products on adult smokers, in terms of personal hygiene and social consideration.
• Clinical Research: Create a suite of foundational clinical techniques that enables the assessment of the risk profile of our Smokeless Products relative to smoking.
• Disease Assessment: Augment classical clinical study methodologies to develop longer term clinical studies with Biomarkers of Potential Harm that are adaptable to novel Adverse Outcome Pathways methodologies.
• Population Health Impact: Entering into the second decade of transformation, changes in disease outcomes for adult smokers who have completely switched to Smokeless Products (as compared to continued smoking) are expected. Adapting cutting edge technologies and methodologies from the pharmaceutical industry and public health research would enable the measurement of morbidity related outcomes at a population level.

Lastly, Digital Data was one discipline that was required across all of the capabilities. A look at the evolution of the data landscape, at how technology is helping businesses solve for today, and how the data analysis that’s possible today can provide us with a new understanding of how we can perform better in the future. Our ethos in augmenting our expertise on Digital Data is based on continuing to build expertise in the classical fields of statistical modelling and analytics, to bringing in novel techniques, which enable the analysis of sparse data and the creation of machine learning systems.

Our ethos in R&D is one of continual improvement where we strive for quantum leaps in our capabilities, but also continually seek the small percentage gains. We envision that advancing our technical capabilities will continue as one of the most important factors in developing and assessing the impact of Smokeless Products on global public health.